call me by yoUr name
Sensual, sweltering and sexy, Luca Guadagnino’s coming-of-age drama Call Me By Your Name is one of the year’s best-reviewed movies, a dark horse in the forthcoming awards race and features a careerredefining turn from Armie Hammer. Total Film takes a bite
Armie Hammer sizzles over one long, hot summer.
Ever since its unveiling at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the buzz has been building for Call Me By Your Name. The latest project from Italian director Luca Guadagnino, this rite-of-passage romance tale set in rural Italy across a long hot 1983 summer, sent critics into raptures. It currently holds a 100 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, making the decision by US distributor Sony Picture Classics to acquire the film before Sundance a canny move. Now, as the awards season cranks into gear, it might just be this year’s Moonlight.
The comparisons to Barry Jenkins’ film aren’t just simply because Call Me… is a low-budget indie that might yet pull the Oscar rug from under the studio behemoths. Like Moonlight, it’s a same-sex love story that transcends the definitions that society frequently places on such tales. Never mind that this tells of a teenage boy and his attraction to the 24-year-old male intern who comes to stay in his home. “It’s not necessarily a gay movie at all,” wrote trade paper Variety in its glowing review.
Star Armie Hammer certainly concurs. “I’m so hesitant to put labels on it,” he explains, when Total Film catches up with him in Berlin’s Adlon Hotel on the day of the film’s European premiere. “It doesn’t feel like these guys would label themselves as anything other than open to this experience.” Hammer plays Oliver, the older of the two, who arrives at a 17th Century country palazzo in northern Italy to work for one Professor Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg), who specialises in Greco-Roman sculpture.
The handsome Oliver soon catches the attention of Perlman’s son, 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet). Vacating his room for Oliver for the summer, at first Elio keeps his distance, quietly observing this older presence who has parachuted into his life. But gradually these two come together, taking bike rides, sipping coffee, playing sports. Even their separate dalliances with local girls are not enough to stave off a curious, even confusing, attraction.
If we get the sense Oliver may have dabbled in same-sex affairs before, he’s not preying on the innocence of Elio, says Hammer. “Nothing about the relationship to us was predatory in nature. It was always something that was a feeling, this spark, this unexplainable desire between these two characters that seemed to grow. It didn’t feel to us at any point – and hopefully it doesn’t feel at any point to the audience – like Oliver is this lascivious character going after Elio. It’s this mutual attraction and acceptance of what they feel for each other that is the beauty of this.”
Pure and simple
Compared to Guadagnino’s breakout film, the stylised marital drama I Am Love (2009), or his garish remake A Bigger Splash (2015), Call Me… is a much gentler piece. “I wanted to be simple and the art of simplicity is very difficult,” the effusive, bearded director notes. “I have a passion in my life which is porcelain. I studied and the greatest act of a manufacturer in porcelain is to make the artefact look as if it’s created by itself without any effort. Yet the artistry that is needed to create it is so deep. And I tried [that] all the time.”
Based on the award-winning 2007 book by André Aciman, the project came together with Guadagnino and producer Peter Spears collaborating with James Ivory, the veteran filmmaker behind The Remains Of The Day and Howards End.
Guadagnino first met him during the production of Ivory’s The White Countess, when he was living in Rome. Originally Ivory intended to direct Call Me… himself, with Shia LaBeouf and Greta Scacchi starring.
LaBeouf didn’t remain attached to the project, just as the notion of Ivory co-directing with Guadagnino was also later nixed. Eventually, with editor Walter Fasano also contributing to the script, Guadagnino graduated to megaphone duties. “We did it, not like a job. We just did it through a year of meetings – in New York and in Crema [where Guadagnino lives] and Pantelleria where I was shooting A Bigger Splash. Only as a sort of game.” He pauses. “It was like eating cherries. One cherry led to another until we made a movie.”
Cherries? What about peaches? The film’s most-talked about scene sees Elio and Oliver find stimulation with a very ripe fruit (in Sundance, audience members were tweeting reactions to the film with peach emojis soon after the screening ended). While Guadagnino toned down the sexual content of the book, the peach interlude still leads to an explicit love-making scene – not that Chalamet was concerned.
“I watched A Bigger Splash and I Am Love, and knew I’d be fine,” says the curly-haired 21-year-old, previously best known for his roles in Homeland and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. “There’s nothing salacious or gratuitous about it. It’s all in service to the love story. It’s not there for the shock-value like you see in other stories. It’s all in service to the celebration of love. It’s only to accentuate the sensuality and the visceral physicality of those moments. For me, it was almost an out-of-body experience.”
As for Hammer – who has played gay characters in Final Portrait and J. Edgar and believes Hollywood is long-since “past” any prejudices when it comes to straight actors in same-sex scenes – he was more “apprehensive” with the sequence in which Elio glimpses him dancing in the town square on a hot summer night. “Here’s the deal: being 6ft 5in on a dancefloor is never to your advantage because it always feels like you’re bumping into somebody, or that everyone is looking at you because you’re so tall.”
Curiously, it’s the second male dance scene in a row for Guadagnino, after Ralph Fiennes in A Bigger Splash. “I would in no way compare my scene to Ralph’s amazing dance scene in that movie,” chuckles Hammer. “That’s one of the best things I’ve seen in my life!” Guadagnino explains. “I think a woman who dances is the most striking image… but a man that dances for me is the most erotic thing. So every time I can make a man dance on screen, I make it happen.”
Peaches and Crema
Guadagnino calls Call Me… the final part of his loosely framed ‘desire’ trilogy, after the similarly summer-set I Am Love and A Bigger Splash. “It’s not something where I said, ‘Now I’m going to do a trilogy on desire.’ I happened to have made three movies about characters that choose to follow their own desires, and the outcome of desire for each of these movies is very different. One is a tragedy, the other is a farce and the third one is an idyll. And I wanted to try to sound the note of an idyll in this case.”
Shot in Guadagnino’s hometown of Crema, in Lombardy (a change from the Ligurian seaside setting of the book), the director encouraged his actors to arrive early. A method he also practised on A Bigger Splash, it’s a way of ensuring his cast feel integral to the production. “I like family. They have to be part of it,” he says. Is it a way for his cast to soak up the
‘There’s nothing salacious; it’s all in service to the love story. It was almost an out-ofbody experience’ TiMOTHÉE CHAlAMET
rhythms of the region, too? “Possibly,” he nods. “That’s one of the avenues, to become part of it, to put roots down.”
For Chalamet, he landed in Italy several weeks before the shoot began, enough time to absorb the culture, the language and take piano and guitar lessons. Then there was his friendship with Hammer. “It wasn’t so much about building a relationship so much as getting there naturally,” says Chalamet. “We just spent a lot of time with one another, whether that was [watching] Mike Tyson documentaries or just getting an espresso in the morning together.”
Come again? Mike Tyson? “I’m a big boxing and Mike Tyson fan,” explains Hammer, “so we started talking about boxing and I was like, ‘Dude, you’re too young to have seen all this! You have to watch these fights!’ So we went back and pretty much watched a whole bunch of old boxing fights, as you do.” Taking in some of Iron Mike’s legendary bouts may not be the type of male bonding practised by Oliver and Elio, but it evidently worked.
When it comes to the story, Guadagnino claims there is “zero” comparison to his own youth. “I’m not someone who got into action. I’m a voyeur. I stay in the corner and would stare at those beautiful bodies. I think I am more like Annella [Elio’s mother, played by Amira Casar] or the maid. I like to cook and I like to observe.” So this isn’t a wishful fantasy? “No, I would have never slept with anybody in my mother’s house. Ever! It was nothing to do with my biography. Honestly.”
That said, Guadagnino’s sublime use of music in the film – from The Psychedelic Furs’ ‘Love My Way’ to songs by Sufjan Stevens and classics by Debussy and Ravel – plugs straight into his past. “I couldn’t help but think of who I was when I was there in the ’80s, and what music I was listening to. The soundtrack of our life is the soundtrack of any radio station when we are 15.” Alongside the film’s sun-dappled cinematography by Thailand-born Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, the sounds immediately immerse you into this halcyon Italian paradise.
Another inspiration was Maurice Pialat’s “massive”
À Nos Amours, a coming-of-age tale starring Sandrine Bonnaire released in 1983, the very year Call Me… is set. Like Pialat, Guadagnino could lay claim to making a generation-defining film about adolescent love – a tactile work so alive you can practically feel the rays of light on your face. Did he always want to celebrate sensuality? “I don’t know,” he shrugs. “Maybe I am a bit of a sensualist intuitively.” He smiles, wryly. “Maybe one day I will
make a movie about nuns! Ninety-year-old nuns!”